Time to make a cup of tea, pretend you’re extremely busy, kick back and relax with a good book.
THE West Cork Literary Festival is a delight each year, and offers some of the most incredible workshops and author readings.
There are some really exciting line-ups for this year’s festival including Richard E Grant, Alan Hollinghurst, Zainab Boladale and a wonderful list of children’s authors and poets.
For a good place to start to get some reading in ahead of the festival, here is a selection of ten worthy reads.
Frankie – Graham Norton
Graham latest novel Frankie was published last September and became a firm favourite with book clubs and readers which won it the Ireland AM Popular Fiction Book of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Award ceremony.
Frankie is a decade-spanning story filled with Graham’s signature witty and engaging characters.
Frankie is an elderly woman confined to her apartment and Damian is a professional carer.
The core of the book is Frankie’s life story which is told via a series of reminiscences (real and imagined) she shares with Damian during long wakeful nights.
Rembrandt’s Promise - Barbara Leahy
Barbara Leahy is an award-winning short story writer and debut novelist from Cork.
Her historical fiction novel Rembrandt’s Promise is based on the true story of a wronged woman who demanded justice, with themes of feminism, loss, ambition and redemption.
Set in 1642 with the Dutch Golden Age underway, Geertje, an impoverished widow from Edam enters a melting pot of wealth and culture when she becomes nursemaid in the house of renowned painter Rembrandt.
After his wife dies, Geertje grows close to him and despite her friends’ warnings she begins a passionate affair with devastating results.
Sunburn – Chloe Michelle Howarth
Chloe lives in Brighton but is from Rosscarbery. Her debut novel Sunburn is a queer, coming-of-age story set in West Cork.
It was shortlisted for the British Book Awards, Nero Book Awards and the Polari First Book Prize for LGBTQ+ literature.
Sunburn is set in the early 1990s in the Irish village of Crossmore, where Lucy feels out of place.
Despite her fierce friendships, she’s always felt this way, and the conventional path of marriage and motherhood doesn’t appeal to her at all.
Not even with handsome and doting Martin, her closest childhood friend.
Lucy begins to make sense of herself during a long hot summer, when a spark with her school friend Susannah escalates to an all-consuming infatuation.
What the Wild Sea Can Be: The Future of the World’s Ocean - Helen Scales
Helen will read from What the Wild Sea Can Be: The Future of the World’s Ocean, which has been longlisted for both the Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction and the Women’s Prize for non-fiction.
She is a marine biologist, acclaimed author, broadcaster and a storytelling ambassador for the Save Our Seas Foundation.
The book draws on more than 20 years of Helen’s exploring and studying the ocean.
The book is an antidote to the rising tide of eco-anxiety, as well as a call to arms. Helen set out to ‘tread a path that combines pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will’ and has done so wonderfully in this book.
Wintering - Katherine May
Katherine is the author of two memoirs Wintering and Enchantment and her works focuses on nature, spirituality, slow living and neurodivergence.
Katherine also writes a popular substack newsletter called The Clearing and hosts a podcast How We Live Now.
Wintering is a poignant and comforting meditation on the fallow periods of life, times when we must retreat to care for and repair ourselves.
Enchantment is an invitation to each of us to experience life in all its sensual complexity and to find the beauty waiting for us as we ground ourselves to the places beneath our feet.
Fair Play - Louise Hegarty
Louise is a debut novelist from Cork. Her novel Fair Play has only just hit the shelves and is one that will no doubt be a favourite on everyone’s reading list.
A group of friends gather at an Airbnb on New Year’s Eve for Benjamin’s birthday.
His sister Abigail is throwing him a jazz-age Murder Mystery themed party and as the night plays out, champagne is drunk, hors d’oeuvres consumed, and relationships are forged, consolidated or frayed.
Someone kisses the wrong person and someone else’s heart is broken.
In the morning, all of them wake up—except Benjamin.
Nature Boy – Seán Ronayne
Seán Ronayne is a Cork-based ornithologist who embarked on a project to sound-record all of Ireland’s regularly occurring birds and an award-winning documentary about him Birdsong, was shown on RTÉ.
His memoir Nature Boy was published in 2024 and won Biography of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards.
The natural world is Seán’s happy place and where he discovered his true passion - identifying and understanding birds through their sound and song.
It is a passion that saved him in the weeks and months following a near-death experience in his late teens.
Even in the darkest times, nature was his guiding light.
As Seán found his path working as an ornithologist, he began to see how, by highlighting the wonder and beauty of the natural world, he could draw attention to the danger it currently faces.
Wake of the Whale – Alice Kinsella and Daniel Wade
Wake of the Whale is a hybrid docutext of poetry and creative nonfiction by Alice Kinsella and Daniel Wade.
It tells the story of the twentieth century whaling stations in County Mayo, and the legacy of whales in Irish waters today.
Together, the authors weave a conversation that challenges our deeply-ingrained assumptions about both human and animal nature.
At the festival, there will be poetry and music live performance with Alice Kinsella and Daniel Wade and musician Patrick Dexter.
Patrick is best known as the cellist from the West of Ireland who captivated audiences with his videos of his outdoor performances during the pandemic.
Kala – Colin Walsh
Colin’s novel Kala was a Book of the Year in the Guardian.
Kala is a dark coming-of-age novel that uses three distinct voices which brilliantly convey the cruelty, self-absorption and vulnerability of teenagers, their shifting allegiances and betrayals, as well as their love for one another.
The novel is set in 2018 in Kinlough, on the west coast of Ireland, where three friends recall the summer they spent together 15 years earlier when Kala Lanann disappeared.
The City Changes Its Face – Eimear McBride
Eimear McBride first burst onto the scene with her remarkable novel A Girl is a Half Formed Thing.
Her work has
been consistently engaging and The City Changes Its
Face is her latest novel which is a tale of passion, jealously and family set in London in 1996 about a love that should have lasted but a certain night that might break it for good.
It is an intimate, visceral, and deeply immersive read that questions what happens to love when trouble comes along.
The festival will take place from July 11th to 18th. For all information, please consult the West Cork Literary Festival website.
